There once was a young man named Deiter
who claimed to be a non believer.
On meeting his maker
he said, “I’m a Quaker.”
But “Not so fast,” said St. Peter.
———
There once was a strong man called Neil
who easily bent pieces of steel.
But then he met Jeannie
who made him a weenie,
who’d do anything to just get a feel.
———-
A yellow streaked man called Howard
Was known to the world as a coward.
But when he came upon a mess,
Namely a looker in distress,
Why then his bravery flowered.
A note to someone:
We may have to refine what “coherent” means in the context of conceptualizing lyric poetry.
A necessary condition of calling something a lyric poem is the intention to have written one. Just to restate it, my broad definition of a lyric poem is, any group of words coherent from first to last set in broken lines and intended as a lyric poem.
Where we come upon clumps of words set in broken lines that are coherent, the best we can do to classify them vis a vis poetry as found art, like a nice piece of driftwood would be or a naturally shaped stone we come across.
As for poetic coherence there must be some meaning moving from first word to last. A phone book as such has that not. It has no poetic coherence. And of course at best it’s a found thing, not a lyric poem due to lacking authorial intent.
Now if someone arranges the names and phone numbers in a way meant to let a line of meaning flow through them, then that coherence may be poetic.
But just to tear a page from a phone book and publish it in a book of “poems” would be like DuChamp’s urinal, the template, I think, for conceptual art, which is problematic as to whether it’s art.
One can argue both sides of that but look how far that, or publishing a phone book, is from my definition of a poem. To reach for such far fetched counter-examples suggests to me the unavailability of a better, more proximate, or to hand, argument.
I don’t think I think of lyric poems as necessarily beautiful and expressive communication of subtle paraphrasable ideas, though some are. Take Wallace Stevens for example. All good lyric poems in virtue of their nature drive to an articulable unity formed by their means. I tend to think of them more as the illumination of a slice or an aspect of experience that can be analogized to a soliloquy about it. They’re a movement that builds up meaning as it proceeds and finally amounts to a coherent poetic whole.
Most broadly, a poem is any group of words coherent from first word to last set in broken lines written with poetic intention.
FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR
The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
Wallace Stevens
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
—————-
R:
I think the thoughts are the way the speaker expresses the sentiments. Take the first stanza:
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This soliloquy is spoken by the "interior paramour," our somewhat shameful love for our own selves, not god. The "small reason" and "think" (not "know") also expresses hesitation about the belief expressed, and the poem as a whole expresses the tentativeness with which this view must be held, in contrast to the certainty of believers. (Of course believers have their own problem, ie., disbelief, but it is usually much more dramatic given the nature of the belief.)
So my paraphrase would describe the various expressions of the tentative state of mind that the poem expresses about what (you elucidate the "what"), and how it does it. But I don't enjoy doing it. It seems clumsy compared to the poem.
——————
Me:
I read you to say we differ in that I see good lyric poems as finally or ultimately expressing ideas, themes—and I have a specific idea about theme, which is what the poem is “saying”, and which can be briefly stated—and you see poems as the, can I say? dramatization or dramatic expression of thoughts.
I remember our difference in that now, and I won’t go on about why I disagree with you. So, I’ll just repeat that I see no exclusiveness between the two approaches and any difference dissolves in a holistic approach.
At this point more interesting to me is coming to better terms with Stevens’ poem, which I’ve looked at more and thought more about. I need to adjust my own initial emphasis
The poem concerns those of us who are “interior paramours”.
And in that, different from you, I see no shameful self love, no hesitation about what the speaker sets out, no tentativeness, no contrast with what believers believe, their certainty. And even if I disagree, don’t you see, as I do, that your description of the ways the tentativeness come across adds up to your own idea of what the poem is about, which is to say, its theme.
Me, more than before, I see a continuity between what’s set out in the first stanza and the heights of things in the last two stanzas. The first stanza is the seeds of what finally culminate in what’s “enough”. The interior paramour isn’t a self lover but rather the lover of innerness, which includes thought and imagination leading to inner illumination.
We start at beginnings: the beginning of light, “the first light of evening”, just as evening is the beginning of darkness, and so the first light of illumination in that darkening; the beginning of the soliloquy, where one speaks to oneself, consistent with the love of innerness; the beginning of “rest”, of calmness, tranquility; the beginning of thought, “for small reason”; the beginning of understanding the interrelation among thought, imagination and beneficence:
we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
And we have the beginning of a self conscious meditation cast in poetry—“as in a room”.
The imagistic and thematic links among the beginnings in the first stanza and the culmination of things in the last two stanzas dispel, I argue, your view of what the first stanza introduces and your characterizations of the sentiments with which I’ve taken issue.
The “small reason” and what we “ think” blossom into the “central mind”. Our initial thought of “the world imagined as the ultimate good” evolves into the fullest and highest synthesis of mind intertwined with imagination as inner illumination:
“Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one... “
From the first lighting the first light of evening, an inner illumination as well as an outer one, we get to “How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
And out of that light, our brightest inner illumination, and out of our connection to the order of things, at first “obscure”, out of the connection to the central mind, we release ourselves from our contraction, our movement into ourselves, over the course of the poem: “the intensest rendezvous”; “we collect ourselves…into one thing”; “within a single thing”; “wrapped tightly around us”. From out of that process, which is a leaving behind of “indifferences”, a forgetting of “each other and ourselves”, we “feel”, and “think” of, “that which arranged the “rendezvous”.
The release from the contraction, the movement to within, is this freeing:
“Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air”
So the beginnings are good. “This is”, which begins the second stanza, refers to the thought that “the world imagined is the ultimate good.” As the speaker says, using the language of logic, “This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.”
So as I say, we have at the highest height of things a kind of symbiosis of knowledge, thought, imagination, God and the light of inner illumination.
There is no end to what can be noted. So I’ll stop here.
————
R:
I would prefer to say the poem depicts a person who. . . etc. I think of poems as verbal portraits based on sentiments expressed. If you think the smile on the Mona Lisa is the theme of the picture, then we agree. But I do agree that sentiments (feeling charged ideas, like a feeling charged face) are the material of the portrait. The Latin tag for my view is ut pictura poesis. "As portraits are so are lyric poems." I thought you paraphrased to make the theme clearer, but one cannot paraphrase a portrait. The words of the poem in that order are the paint. One makes of the paint a portrait, one makes of the words a portrait, not paraphraseable thoughts. Two very different ways of taking words. De Santis wasn't popular not because of what he said but his "presentation of self" was not appealing. (So it was said).
The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
Wallace Stevens
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
R:
Not a faith many can live with, or even understand. Lovely though.
Many of his poems are concerned with the idea that the worlds we create with our imaginations, the ordinary everyday world, which is lovely and ugly, etc. good and evil, is one, and science just gives us new powers over it and is itself an achievement of our imaginations. Rather like Blake's view, but the relaxed atheist one, not Blake's passionate marriage of heaven and hell.
Me:
I’m curious about this poem.
Some say it’s about the imagination or imaginative creativity.
I tried briefly online to check out Stevens’ views on religion but seemed to get conflicting answers such as, not religious as such, lapsed religiosity, poetry or the creative imagination as replacing diminishing religious belief, or he was religious. I found—it was only the briefest look—no firm answer.
I read the poem as deeply religious, showing an interrelation between God and the imagination even while the “poet”, ie, the speaker, is non committal as to the existence of God or if God exists merely because we have created Him.
I read the poem to mean it doesn’t matter.
Either way, there is a God, and we reach spiritual height either in virtue of Him and our ability to imagine Him or, differently, in virtue of our ability to imagine Him into existence.
When we reach Him, it is a unifying, peace of mind-making, abiding, sheltering, synthesizing, beautiful, fusing physical and spiritual, necessary and sufficient, all resolving, transcending order of Him correlative with our capacity to imagine him.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
The pathway of the poem is an “epistemological” and spiritual journey from “for small reason” and “the first light” to “the central mind”, “the highest candle lights in the dark” and to “ In which being there together is enough.”
I reject views of this poem as the imagination, read art, read poetry, taking the place of God in our lives.
